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The Maragha Massacre: the other face of the coin in the Karabakh War

armenpress.am04/10th/2020, 1:48

The Maragha Massacre: the other face of the coin in the Karabakh War

April 10 marks the 28th-anniversary of the Maragha massacre, one of the most frightful pogroms committed by the Azerbaijani military against peaceful Armenian inhabitants during the Artsakh Liberation War.

Maragha was one of the largest and richest villages in Artsakh before the war - several factories operated, and viticulture was developed in the village. After the pogroms in Baku, Sumgait and Kirovabad, attacks on the civilian Armenian population were highly increased in scope, forcing most of the locals to leave their native villages. On April 10 of 1992, Azerbaijani Defence Ministry, Internal Affairs Ministry and OMON forces (Special Purpose Police Units of the Ministry of Internal Affairs of Azerbaijan) launched an attack on 118 civilians who were unable to leave Maragha. Staying there for only 5-6 hours, Azerbaijani units brutally killed about 50 people and took almost as many civilians as hostages, including 29 women, 9 children, as well as disabled people among them. Subsequently, it became possible to rescue some of these people, including all the children, yet the fate of 19 hostages still remains unknown.

The village of Maragha was located in the Martakert region of Nagorno Karabakh, just across the border from the Azerbaijani town of Terter (Mir-Bashir) and was one of the region's largest villages. According to the census of 1989, the village had a population of more than 5000 people, predominantly ethnic Armenians including a few Armenian families who escaped pogroms and were forcefully deported from Sumgait, Baku, and other areas of Soviet Azerbaijan. Starting from 1954, Maragha and a village named Margushevan, located in the vicinity of Maragha, were united together under one state farm (sovkhoz) which was named Leninavan (“Lenin’s town”).

After the start of the Karabakh Movement, the tension in Maragha was highly increased; the village was under constant shelling and the civilians were in a state of fear because of the attacks towards their properties and cattle, as well as themselves and their families. Azerbaijan tightened the blockade which it had imposed on Nagorno-Karabakh for about two years, at the same time employing a policy of ethnic cleansing and military assaults against the Armenians in Karabakh. Maragha and the neighbouring villages were systematically raided by Azerbaijani armed forces. In the aftermath, some of the residents of the village had to leave their houses and temporarily settle in other regions of Artsakh. Those who chose to stay had a clear perception that the only way to survive was to organize self-defence.

The Maragha self-defence

The self-defence units' members who were mostly the locals of Maragha and the surrounding villages set up 4 defence positions around the village while the residents built underground shelters. According to the commander of the self-defence unit Roma Karapetyan, the first attack took place on 25-26 February 1992 and received a proper counterattack. But the situation changed in April when the offensives started to be guided by Azerbaijani Defense Ministry forces.

On April 10, 1992, the Defense Ministry Units of Azerbaijan along with the units of the Internal Affairs Ministry and the OMON forces attacked the village 3 times in a row, without any success. The main attack on Maragha was carried out by not only a manifold but also a big number of armoured vehicles, including tanks. The self-defence units had to retreat as they did not have appropriate military equipment to deliver a counterattack.

Within a few hours, Azerbaijani military forces destroyed and burned the houses, practically razed everything to the ground, brutally tortured peaceful civilians to death, burnt alive, dismembered, mutilated without discrimination and captured many locals, mostly elderly, women and children, to unknown directions.

"Among the streets, 1 out of every 10 people had swords in their hands. At that time, I ordered the guys to shoot the ones carrying swords with them. Then it turned out that some of the other volunteers had also heeded the same thing in the other parts of the village", recalls Roma Karapetyan. Later, as Karapetyan says, they found bodies of civilians with Christian cross marks made by those swords.

Karapetyan says that their main goal was to liberate the village before dawn as they clearly understood that the more they wait, the more innocent civilians are going to be tortured by Azerbaijanis. They received help from the other self-defence units, fighting in the surrounding area. Despite the lack of sight, arms and people, the Maragha Liberation plan was completed successfully. It is worth mentioning that Leonig Azgaldyan and Vladimir Balayan were among the volunteers of the assistance group. Both of them posthumously received Artsakh Hero awards in 2019. Roma Karapetyan says Azerbaijan had 44 losses while there were no victims from the Armenian side.

The Golgotha of the 20th century

“I, along with my team from Christian Solidarity Worldwide, arrived within hours to find homes still smouldering, decapitated corpses, charred human remains, and survivors in shock. This was truly like a contemporary Golgotha many times over”,- writes Baroness Cox of Queensbury, a defender of human rights in the House of Lords, United Kingdom.

According to eyewitness accounts, people were decapitated, tortured (being dragged tied to a tank or burnt alive), bodies were mutilated, dissected an...

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